"Over the past few years the situation on the international labour markets has changed dramatically. While countries such as the United States or Great Britain are being affected by increasing wage differentials, the unemployment figures in most continental European countries are on the rise. In...

Most evaluation studies of active labour market policies (ALMP) focus on the microeconometric evaluation approach and work with individual data. The main question is if the interesting outcome variable for an individual is affected by the participation in an ALMP programme. That being done, the...

Supporting start-ups by unemployed persons with governmental programs became an important issue as benefits could include termination of unemployment and further job creation. However, it is feared that previously unemployed lack qualifications for entrepreneurship. We analyze potential effects...

Risk attitudes have an impact on not only the decision to become an entrepreneur but also on the survival and failure rates of entrepreneurs. Whereas recent research underpins the theoretical proposition of a positive correlation between risk attitudes and the decision to become an entrepreneur,...

This paper empirically analyzes whether the character-based approach, which focuses on the personality structure and the human capital of business founders, allows prediction of entrepreneurial success. A unique data set is used consisting of 414 persons whose personal characteristics were...

Based on the conditional independence or unconfoundedness assump- tion, matching has become a popular approach to estimate average treatment effects. Checking the sensitivity of the estimated results with respect to devia- tions from this identifying assumption has become an increasingly...

Labor market programs may affect unemployed individuals' behavior before they enroll. Such ex ante effects are hard to identify without model assumptions. We develop a novel method that relates self-reported perceived treatment rates and job-search behavioral outcomes, like the reservation wage,...

Matching has become a popular approach to estimate average treatment effects. It is based on the conditional independence or unconfoundedness assumption. Checking the sensitivity of the estimated results with respect to deviations from this identifying assumption has become an increasingly...

Propensity Score Matching (PSM) has become a popular approach to estimate causal treatment effects. It is widely applied when evaluating labour market policies, but empirical examples can be found in very diverse fields of study. Once the researcher has decided to use PSM, he is confronted with...